School Tech Connect: See You Thursday Night?:
by noreply@blogger.com (Tim Furman)
I'll be at this townhall, sponsored by
Raise Your Hand:
Culture of Testing
November 29, 2012
Holstein Park
2200 N. Oakley
7PM
Wendy Katten has a
terrific post on the subject. I'll just clip a bit here:
We have heard all year about all the failing schools and need for quality seats, as if the learning/seats in the building are fixed and intractable, and the culture inside a building is not something that is fluid to be developed and improved upon from teachers/administrators and the leaders of the district as a whole. Can we really expect students to firmly believe in themselves when their schools are labeled “on probation,” “failing”, etc., and they are assigned with Level systems and color codes based on test scores to determine whether they will stay open or be closed?
Indeed. The whole "quality seats" notion is so juvenile that I regard it as one of two commonly used phrases that identify a person who doesn't know what he or she is talking about. The other phrase, by the way, is "voting with their feet," a phrase leaned on heavily by my alderman, Joe Moore.
Anyway, I personally left teaching because of the culture of testing--- I've never talked to anyone whom I would regard as an inspiring teacher who feels that standardized testing is worth all of the damage it does. But it's very popular with other people who have no day-to-day relationship to the actual teaching of actual kids.
To switch topics completely, let me just say that the weirdest thing happened an hour ago. I was listening to the audiobook version of
Roberto Bolaño's 2666, a rambling story that's frankly trying my patience, while cleaning the office and guest bathroom in my flat. Mind you, my apartment is cluttered stem to stern with the accumulated crap of a lifetime spent in secondhand shops, so the unlikely object below is exactly the thing I was dusting during the weird occurrence:
That's a totally random drawing of the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens, London, in case you were wondering. It's on my wall because at some point in the 1980's I spent a nice afternoon in the presence of this small statue, and I have many clever things to say about it, if this were an entirely different sort of blog. Nevertheless, there it is, on the wall of my guest bathroom.
So, as I'm dusting this drawing, here's what the narrator of Roberto Bolaño's story is whispering into my ear:
I ask you: what are the odds of reading about this obscure English statue while dusting a drawing of it in a bathroom in Chicago? I'll tell you what the odds are--- they're really, really small. Infinitesimal. And yet, they're better odds than the likelihood that you can draw a meaningful conclusion about a CPS school and the people inside of it based on its inane 1-2-3 rating.
And on that note, I'll let you get back to your Sunday. Please stop by and say hi if you're coming to the town hall on Thursday night.
Print
